Blogiversary VII: The FISA-ing





No, not for everybody–this is about me!


The Seven & Seven



Garnish with a lemon slice.


That does not sound good.












But all that changed on. . . .













And I do mean everybody.

Obama Drops Nuclear from Energy Segment of Convention Speech


Compare and contrast.

































































The Party Line – June 24, 2011: The Play’s the Thing

I spent Thursday evening at New York City’s Town Hall—which is a theater, complete with stage, and not a government building—attending the multi-media launch of “Rebuild the Dream,” an attempt to shape a movement around a push for economic justice and against the corporatist forces that have so skewed the political debate in recent decades.

Yes, decades. While the keynote speech by Van Jones was likely referencing the very obvious injustices of the last decade or so, one of the graphs projected behind him on stage showed that the disparity between worker productivity and wages (the former increasing sharply while the latter barely edged above flat-lining) started in about 1980.

That 1980 was the year Ronald Reagan ran successfully for president is not a coincidence.

It has long been my contention that the 1980 election, and the Reagan presidency that followed, forever changed America’s perception of itself. Prior to that time, Americans saw their country as a land of plenty. There were pitched political battles to be sure, but they were over how to distribute that plenty, how to husband the bounty that was the USA’s fortunate combination of vast natural resources and forward-thinking spirit of innovation. That is not to discount the great disparities that existed, but, at least since World War II, those disparities were not the product of national privation.

All that changed with Reagan. Suddenly, our resources were scarce, the American pie was finite, and if one didn’t hustle to get a slice, someone else would get it first. Making it in America became a competitive sport. Those that made a point of questioning the theory of evolution championed social Darwinism as the natural order.

Beginning with Reagan, too, America started looking backward. When a Reagan campaign ad declared it was “morning in America,” it was not looking forward to a new day, better than the previous one. Instead, the “morning” was one of nostalgia for a mythic place where life appeared simpler and race and gender roles seemed more clearly defined and enforced. For Ronald Reagan and his ilk, America’s best days were found in the past.

In other words, Reagan was a pessimist, and all those who have followed in his footsteps, claimed his mantle, or praised his presidency—Republicans and Democrats—are also selling America short.

Enter the seemingly unflappable optimist, Van Jones. Jones indeed put up a picture of a pie (apple), and noted that it wasn’t the whole pie that was shrinking, just your slice. America wasn’t broke, Jones said, it had just been robbed. And, over the next hour, Jones did a nice job detailing some of the myths—“lies,” he rightfully called them—that have promulgated the pessimism and stood in the way of economic justice.

But after that hour, after the explication of the current situation, beyond Van Jones’s own infectious spirit, what did we have?

And there’s the rub, for it was an evening long on diagnosis, but short on prescription. Yes, all were told that ideas were to be submitted to a website on July 5, and that house meetings to discuss those ideas would follow, but the evening left me with more questions than answers. What is the goal, in concrete terms, of this movement? What kind of action(s) will it use? What are the targets of those actions? Is this a play at the federal level, or will it focus on state politics? Or local governments?

I suppose Jones and his coalition would tell me that is up to me. . . to me, you, all of us who participate in something bottom-up and grass-roots—but I would hope that someone on the inside has a little more of plan than that.

One need only pick up on the name not spoken—not once that I can recall in the entire event—that of President Barack Obama, to begin to grasp the problems any attempt at a broad coalition will run into at the federal level. Jones made two oblique references, first saying that in 2008 we voted for “Peace and prosperity, not war and austerity”—a nice turn of phrase (and a true one) that left me thinking about who embodied those ideals. And, second, Obama’s momentary “green jobs czar” stated that the movement to rebuild the American dream was “not about an individual person” because we had learned what that got us.

Pointed in its way, I suppose, but still far from a direct attack, and I fear that times are bad enough—as the event tried hard to make clear—that a direct attack is most certainly what is needed. I am not talking about a primary challenge for Obama, or a national third party up-and-running by 2012, but a direct acknowledgment that Obama and the Democrats need the support of the people this nascent movement hopes to empower. For without that recognition, without that willingness to use the power “Rebuild the Dream” hopes to acquire and shape, then there is nowhere for the movement to move. There is no play—not state or federal—and as another fond of the stage once said, “The play’s the thing.”

The Party Line – June 17, 2011: Noble Savages

This week, I am at Netroots Nation #6 in Minneapolis, and I had planned to bring you a video all about one of the themes I saw running through the first day of panels, speeches and briefings. . . I had planned to bring you video, but I am only here through Sunday and that is probably not enough time to upload my usual eight-or-so minutes because the speed of the internet connection here is pre-millennial. . . again.

This is actually another common theme, one that runs through pretty much every one of the NetNats I have attended. The internet is either not free, not fast, or both. I can remember running down to a lobby to get a connection one year, balancing my computer on the mini fridge near the door of my room another. And always, the waiting—the spinning, gray-barred, “sorry, you are not connected to the internet” waiting.

Now, obviously, the conference organizers cannot really be held responsible for the internet in the hotels—and the wifi in the convention center is certainly an improvement over last year—but damn! Every year I come to the largest concentration of netizens on the planet, and it is like we are suddenly the cast of some cyber version of “Survivor.”

It’s, like, practically “Lord of the Flies.”

OK, perhaps I exaggerate just a tad, but it is a constant—every year a consistent struggle to break through to the super tubular interwebs we remember from home.

Which is also kind of serendipitous because the theme from this year that I wanted to note was that everyone seems to be expressing a frustration with the inability of progressive ideas to break through—break through to the legacy media, break through the establishment-policed, corporate-driven narrative, break out of our bright, shiny ghetto of liberal thought. It seems that, after being quite obviously on the outside during the infancy of the blogosphere, progressives expected a nurturing embrace after the presidential election of 2008—or at least expected not to be punched—and now, not feeling the love, the natives are restless.

I hear the frustration—hell, I feel it, too—but I am not sure if I have yet heard the answer to it. A popular (dare I say) “mantra” is that we have to break out of our silos. The idea is that the left is fractured—fractured over strategy, over tactics, over goals, over issues. It is the belief that, so far, we have not done enough to find commonality among theoretically different movements inside the broader progressive one.

There is probably some, or plenty, of that sort of problem, but it just doesn’t feel, to me, like it is the problem. Fracturing is actually pretty much the way of all revolutions—from 1848 to the present—and heaven knows the right, whose narrative we are trying to crash, has plenty of fissures, from hairline cracks to continental divides.

Another “answer” I heard was that the left needs to be more daring. (“Bold” is one mighty over-used word these days.) And it needn’t be a big production—glitter bombing Newt Gingrich (and, just yesterday, Tim Pawlenty) broke though for one shining moment—it just needs to be original and, ideally, telegenic (think: singing to the president about Bradley Manning). Dan Choi, speaking on a Thursday panel, said we have to be willing to get crazy, “And crazy is not a limited resource among activists.”

I am not against that, but I see three problems. First, the brevity of the breakthrough, second, the need to continually ratchet up the “crazy” to get attention, and third, the fact that crazy often plays right into the establishment stereotypes of lefties. You might get them to cover your action, but being daring does not prevent the legacy media from marginalizing your position.

I also heard several mentions of the need for the left to build its own media complex to compete with the corporate behemoths that now have an iron grip on the narrative. This “tactic,” I’m afraid, seems to be idle dreaming—as far off as say, my ability to stream video at this hotel.

Better, I think, would be a search for the next social organizing tool. The twitter or what-have-you of 2013. Something relatively cheap to use and so new that it has not yet been commandeered by right wing activists or co-opted by capitalists. I am thinking this is possible, but, of course, I am thinking about something I cannot really describe, except to say it will be the next big thing.

And finally, only touched on today, the idea that we need to think beyond silos on the left and attempt to find alliances across traditional boundaries. Looking for what the establishment might think of as “strange bedfellow” pairings to flummox the forces that find it easy to wall-off and marginalize issues embraced solely by the familiar left. That is, real, results-oriented “bipartisanship,” as opposed to the process-driven kind. (Jane has called this “transpartisanship.”)

Yes, I would have talked about all of that in my video—but I cannot upload anything even remotely that long. Once again, progressive ideas marginalized and shut out by the media. . . or, maybe in this case, the medium.





(A version of this post previously appeared on Firedoglake.)